letter to an old poet (sof's version)
some brief *thoughts* on boygenius, dead dogs, & love-muck
I’ve been thinking about my childhood dog. Emily, a chocolate lab. The one who I held as she died, disappeared, the afternoon sunlight bleeding all over her matted brown fur, my dad and I crying with equal intensity, sudden mirrors of loss and salt-water. We were both more devastated than we thought we’d be—my mother was the crier, anyways. But: Emily, her panting head in my lap, though, the familiar whitening around her snout and ears, the familiar scruffiness of her fur, the pink tumor bursting from her bottom lip—I scratched her ears and stroked her head, openly wept while I babbled about how much I loved her and how she’d somehow, I don’t know, become the sunlight that was cradling her now, or the grass she’d shit on, or maybe her ashes would become fertilizer for something else to grow. Whatever I talked about, whatever I said, none of it really mattered. I couldn’t make any promises and she wouldn’t have understood them even if I did.
She slipped away. Inch by inch. Till her breathing stopped, life evacuated. Till we were sitting there wrapping her body in blankets and carrying her to the vet hospice nurse’ car. Till I was kissing her head and letting the nurse hug me tightly and tell me how sorry she was, how memory could be a salve if I just let its hurt linger for a while, till she drove away with 14 years of a life splayed out in the trunk. Those last moments, though, bruised me, yes, but the bruising also felt like an alleviation, an extended sigh, an okay exhaled and lungs emptied. Those last moments immediately invited me to the palpable, but weightless sensation that death did not need to be unbearable, death did not need to be terrifying or faraway or always irredeemable, tragic. Death could be that patch of tenuous sunlight against her warm, then cold, body, could be the light in her eyes quietly disappearing, could be difficult and wept-over and stinging with pain but could also, at the same time, be painless, be a timely and neutral and peaceful, perhaps even merciful departure.
I didn’t want to turn her death into a metaphor, because of course it was snotty, ugly-crying, grief-struck territory, but it also maybe carries metaphor with it, embedded. Yes, she was just a dog, but a loss is a loss—every death takes other things with it, I mean, besides itself; every death also seems to dissolve all the connotations and selves tethered to the dying thing. I think that this expansiveness is unavoidable. That of course the loss of the dog you grew up alongside is also, in all the cliched and saccharine ways, the loss of some ember of your childhood as well, at least a cell or limb of it.
I’ve been thinking, too, about Boygenius’ new album, because of course I am—though by “thinking” I really mean obsessing over, inhabiting, eating/breathing/ingesting etc. Sometimes you simply listen to music and sometimes music crawls into the most secret and tender and difficult cavities of your heart and reveals their cartographies to you, summons hidden mourning and desire and history up to the surface of your skin, reddens your face, gathers like moss in your chest. I can’t say anything particularly critical or intelligent, I think, about the music that does this to me—I’m too deeply ensnared by it, can’t be a keen ear or voice, could never work at a music magazine for this reason. Sometimes the sensation of lovingsomethingsomuch is senseless and overly indulgent and inexplicable. But it’s also a sensation you can’t just dislodge or temper via critical analysis, via rationale.
I find myself so often working overtime to soften the appearance and intensity of my appreciation/love for pieces of art or media, for my interests or obsessions, to preemptively apologize for liking—much less loving—just about anything and everything, because I feel mostly incapable of liking things a normal amount. I mean things like books or music or films or pieces of art, or mycelium networks or cooking, I don’t know. I feel this way about The Last of Us and I feel this way, right now, about Boygenius. It’s hard not to fully inhabit art, I mean, when it gets at something true and precise and seemingly inarticulable.
This is not a critical or exhaustive review of an album. This is a little love letter, like most of these essay-things are lately—the criticism exists, of course, is necessary, but this isn’t where I feel the need to deliver that. (Lately it feels crucial to cling to the forms of warmth, of sustenance, that don’t rely on the volatility and tenuous ground of so many relationships—particularly those with cis men; perhaps cis men cannot generally fathom openly & unabashedly loving something and so we non cis-men train ourselves to conceal-carry our feelings, our expansive or too-big too-tender selves).
Every song on Boygenius’ EP feels struck-through with a particular (resonant, precise, and deeply felt!) desperation, a clawing and tortured-but-tender plea to a species of love that maybe isn’t quite the nourishment it seems to be. There is so much apologizing to do, so much self-effacing, self-scarring, in these songs that I love so much; “I can’t love you how you want me to” or “Wasn’t a fighter till somebody told me I had better learn to lean into the punch,” and “I’m in the backseat of my body,” there are so many ways to fall facefirst into concrete and shatter a tooth, so many wounds to be reopened and salted, but also, the strangeness of simultaneously inhabiting those injuries and never fully feeling the whole force of them, always slightly elsewhere, away, evading the acute punch and only tasting the ghost-ache of its bruise. “Ketchum, ID” is the song that feels most pointed in the direction of the record, actually—its tone differs from the other songs, less hungry-for-love and more attuned to the mundane and ongoing project of being-with-each-other, of inhabiting vulnerability without searching for exit routes every other minute.
the record is undoubtedly as nuanced and multi-layered as the EP, built from reeds of pain and strands of blue-dark grief, but there’s a tenderness, a soft unfurling palm of warmth, that feels distinctly new, in a perhaps inconspicuous way. There’s something quiet and so loved in this album. I don’t see those claw marks on the walls, don’t hear the same sense of precarity or swelling loneliness that I do (and appreciate, still) in the EP. The boys (aka my kings lucy, phoebe, and julien) do not need to invent anything; they don’t need to fucking upend and redefine Indie Folk Rock Music every time they make anything together. What they’re doing, I think, actually, kind of resists that Pitchfork-dudebro-tendency to push artists to always INVENT or FUNDAMENTALLY RUPTURE their genre whenever they put new music out—aka “progress,” the most beloved of neoliberal & masculinized myths.
What I mean is: the album isn’t trying to Change Everything in music. The album is one spiraling, earnest love letter—and not to men, actually!, but to each other. I don’t mean this in a pseudo-feminist “sisterhood” bullshit way. I mean this in a queer, expansive and tender and life-affirming way; the record feels, above all, like a blue-lit homage to queer friendship (see “the film” above, in which friends kiss, gasp!), to love that doesn’t self-mythologize or neatly align into patriarchal or heteronormative categories, to holding each other and knowing each other and caring in the quieter, day-to-day ways. In that “true blue” that emerges in the warm room of platonic intimacy, gathering and pooling, endless. This album registers as blue, for me, and not as in sadgirlmusic (which feels like the most reductive and annoying/dismissive way to every describe music made by women) way, not pure uncomplicated sorrow. There’s a depth to the blue here. I’m reminded of one of my favorite reflections on blue, from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost:
“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.”
Longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world. I listen to “True Blue” and Lucy Dacus’s ever-precise lyricism and careful handling of her words feels like devotion in the most everyday sense, granted; a votive candle lit and left on the windowsill, warm bread being kneaded while you gossip about whatever, drinking coffee next to each other and reading, I don’t know. All of the silly intimacies and silences and scabs within a friendship, within any real connection. She sings, “It feels good to be known so well / I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself” and isn’t that intimacy distilled to its most basic and honest color? Is the “blue world” of longing this one—where you can be disarmed without a knot in your throat, without panic constellating in your chest? Where you aren’t constantly searching for exit routes, escape paths. Maybe it is the color “where you can never go.” Not permanently, I mean—we can’t ever truly wholly know someone—but the reaching, the extended hands, the million tiny attempts we make, anyways, I think, is what makes life livable. All the steps we take toward the horizon-line that is another person. All the ways we keep trying to hold each other’s wreckage and loneliness and linger in the blue spaces together, at the very least.
You know that kind of cyclical, airless longing, that feels like a drowning that never ends? You kind of wish the water would just fill your lungs and silence your needy little pulse, already, because this performance—of being cool about it—cannot go on forever, except that it keeps going on, keeps finding new ways to linger and keep the show running.
I have never been cool about anything in my whole life. I’ve realized I’m incapable of that and I’ve accepted it. But “Cool About It” punctures the fact that I still try to appear cool about things I am internally definitely not cool about. The song winds through the voices of Julien, Lucy, and Phoebe, one by one—their respective attempts at appearing disaffected, of pretending to have no needs or feelings, and all the fault-lines in those attempts brought to the surface, revealed. It’s such an engrossing song because it’s so deeply familiar. The pretending and the failures of pretending. Of longing thickening and fossilizing in you until you don’t think you can possibly deny its presence anymore, of all the unspokens gathering and demanding to be spoken, finally, and still, still you try your very best to not let your own heart show through your performance. Still it is easier to stay in this volatility and hide there.
I can walk you home and practice method acting
I’ll pretend being with you doesn’t feel like drowning
Telling you it’s nice to see how good you’re doing
Even though we know it isn’t true
Pretending being with someone doesn’t feel like drowning is a sport I’ve become quite good at. I love boygenius for rendering that sensation so carefully, naming what I would otherwise be unable to name. Sometimes hearing what might feel like your own private despair splayed out and articulated can be an anchor, a massive relief.
There’s also “Not Strong Enough,” which demystifies another otherwise-hidden feeling I’ve had, percolating: a line that comes near the end of the song, Lucy Dacus singing it first, and Julien and Phoebe both joining in, with this increasing feverishness. It’s one of the album’s best moments, I think, the sheer ferocity of it, their combined voices and the escalating volume and instrumentals and the line, repeated, over and over: “Always an angel / never a god.” It didn’t quite hit me, the first time I heard that line. I didn’t quite register the meaning until, one morning, recently, pouring oat milk into my coffee (if you didn’t know, I’m bi), internally trying to untangle the way someone in particular makes me feel, I was playing the song and it really did feel like a musical-double-take. And perhaps that’s what boygenius always does for me, delivering me to my own feelings, the most embarrassing and seemingly private ones, with full sincerity. I don’t know, dude. It just lodged into me and gave a short line to what seemed like a whole indecipherable mess of feelings: always an angel, never a god. Like. Thank you, Lucy, Phoebe, Julien.
“Letter to an Old Poet,” the final song on the album, makes me cry every single time I listen to it, even now, after I’ve listened to it a hundred times. Phoebe’s primarily singing on this one, and she delivers this song in this, at first, devastatingly-exhausted-but-yearning tone (just like me fr), and the lyrics fucking sting:
I said I think that you’re special
You told me once that I’m selfish
And I kissed you hard, in the dark, in the closet
You said my music is mellow
Maybe I’m just exhausted
You think you’re a good person because you won’t punch me in the stomach
—from “Letter to an Old Poet”
If “Moon Song” was about, in Bridgers’ own words, “wanting someone to treat you badly because at least they’ll treat you at all,” then this song seems to follow this sensation to its end-point. But this song possesses, what feels like, to me, a tentative, quietly sprouting hope that “Moon Song” (my most-listened-to-ever-spotify-song so…i need to be sedated yes) doesn’t, exactly.
Ending a record can be tricky, but this may be one of the most unexpectedly hopeful and sincere endings to an album I’ve ever heard, really. Hanif Abdurraqib, one of my all-time favorite writers (especially in how he writes about music), writes, in an old essay (on believing/ghosts/music/just read it plz) for The Paris Review, entitled “On Believing,”
“Once, on a drive back from Windsor, a friend asked, ‘What is the point of the song if we don’t know what we shouldn’t stop believing in?’ And another said, ‘Yeah, what is the feeling we should be holding on to, exactly?’ The only way to answer is to measure how many things we love have been made into ghosts, and how much time we have spent grasping at them.”
This song can be distilled in this way: a measuring of the things we’ve loved and a reckoning with they ways they’ve been transformed into ghosts, and, most of all, realizing how much time has been spent grasping at them in the dark—at someone or something that doesn’t want to be grasped at, doesn’t want to be known the way we want to know them, doesn’t want to know us as much as they want to bruise us.
The song ends—and the ending is what always makes my throat swell up or my eyes water at least a little; I’m emotionally beholden to this part of the song in some melodramatic way:
I wanna be happy
I wanna walk into my room without looking for you
Go up to the top of our building
And remember my dog when I see the full moon
I can’t feel it yet
But I am waiting
If “Me and My Dog,” from Boygenius’ EP (also one of my most-listened-to albums ever on Spotify, of course) is a compound fracture in song form, a disassemblage of bent bones and twisted limbs and blood-feeling-love-wreckage, of depression’s insistent everyday grief and its phantom limbedness (numbed capacity to love, to feel, to receive love), if it’s a tired desire to flee to the farthest reaches of outer space, to only interact with the world and one’s life through the window of a spaceship, then “Letter to an Old Poet” is its sequel not only in lyric and sonic repetition but in feeling, too. The wounded, exhausted longing that builds and pulses through “Me and My Dog” has shifted into a new register, into a space that feels less split-open, less broken-into and apart.
“I wanna be happy,” as opposed to the belted line of “Me and My Dog,” which is “I wanna be emaciated.” I almost sang “I wanna be emaciated” at this part of the song, but the second I heard the "happy” my eyes welled up, dramatic and gut-punched and throat-dry in only the way queer women’s music can make me feel, really, and boygenius especially always makes a mess of me. The context of the lyrics, too, makes it so much more gutting; knowing that Phoebe’s beloved childhood pug Max died after they released their EP, ft “Me and My Dog,” felt like shards of glass in my chest, so, thanks for that! Something about that shade of mourning, of missing your dead dog, inevitably, if inadvertently, lends itself to metaphor in a way that really seems to thaw at some ice sheet in your heart, I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but…I cannot sever that specific grief from the attached grief of growing up, out of childhood, away from home, of a family splitting at the seams and life sprawling out in too many directions to feel anywhere close to ground. I always think of little-kid me, because Emily was around for all of it—I cannot quite separate her from the myths I wrangle of my own childhood, as self-absorbed or anthropocentric that may be.
Queer desire can just be this: the desire to feel OKAY. To not be constantly hyper-vigilant for all the ways the world constantly conspires to quite literally unmake and criminalize and disappear you, to maybe have a nervous system that can quiet down for a little while. A soft place to land. A friendship that buoys you, that sits in the hurt and the longing together. Time with the bros. Doing nothing together and that nothing becomes everything. To be able to fuck around, make bad jokes, gossip, sleep in too late, complain, ugly-snort-belly-laugh, cry over nothing, engage in some amateur witchcraft, hex a few men, whatever. To remind yourself today you WANT TO BE ALIVE. That there are in fact good reasons to be alive, to stay here for just a little while longer, for as long as this life’ll have you. Because we are guests, after all—imperceptible synapses in the universe, barely registering, barely visible to anyone but ourselves. We are here for such a brief and weird, frantic time, I mean, and to be queer is often to be hyper-aware of the precarity of, well, everything, ever. And so the record feels radical to me because it just insists on really truly full-heartedly being here, in the blue, together, as jagged and tenuous as it all is.
I wish representations of queer friendship and intimacy and living weren’t radical. I mean I wish they were commonplace, everywhere, that to see yourself reflected in this way didn’t feel so enormous and aching. I wish the boys (lucy phoebe julien) could just be the boys. But truthfully, the world’s been aflame for a while now and queer existence isn’t any less dangerous or threaded with landmines. So not having to be Genius Genre-Shifting Monumental Superstars, to just be some pals making earnest and poignant music together, to not have to earn your right to fucking exist, feels really important, and it feels like a space to breathe freely within, to actually take a deep and long and tired breath and just exhale it all at once. Mythologize friendship, make love stories out of inside jokes and intertextuality, be overly sentimental and also tongue-in-cheek and not afraid to lean into your feelings, let them scald you, let them remind you love is always somewhere, present and murmuring and gentle even if it’s not where you might’ve wanted it to be.
That there might be some blue world waiting, just underneath the scarring and rot of our own heartbreaks and most damaging attachments. There might be a blue world that doesn’t happen all at once, but it happens, in glimpses, in the collapse of a pernicious and long-felt pain, in the softening of light and a peaceful death, in the connective tissue that is friendship, that is queerness and all the very small, often imperceptible ways it can remake the world, draw the blueness to the surface like blood flushing our faces. We’re waiting. Maybe the waiting persists for the rest of our lives, who fucking knows. But we’re waiting together, the record insists. The waiting doesn’t need to be solitary—it can happen with friends’ sadnesses threading together and gently untangling the most calcified knots, holding space for all that our friends and we ourselves are. I don’t have any conclusive wrap-up here, nothing profound to say about this album, just that, I think that feeling—but I’m waiting—and the fact that they extend that note, that they hold it, balance it, stay there, waiting for a queer and glimmering something, together, feels like everything, to me. Feels essential, and worth loving.